"Hens, Bears and Eagles"
Isaiah 51:12-16; Luke 13:31-35
Rev. Laura J. Collins
October 20, 2002
For more two weeks now, we in the Washington region have lived with the shock and grief and fear of a people under fire. I pray that the person or people bringing this death and pain to our community will soon be caught. I pray that no more innocent people will die in his gunfire. I pray that our children will once again play with freedom and innocent abandon. But between international terrorism and local terror, we will no doubt still be shaken.
During these weeks of terror and sadness it is not my own death I fear nearly as much as I fear the death of my child. How would I be able to bear such pain, I wonder? I think of people I know who have lost their children. They managed to go on. But the loss is never far from their minds. Of course, only a few short generations ago in this country the loss of one's children was not unusual. Graveyards are filled with whole families lost to childhood disease. To this day in many places around the globe losing some of one's offspring is an expected, though still tragic, part of life. In some parts of our nation and our nation's capital, young people die by gunfire and other violent deaths at a shocking rate.
I have wondered many times what it felt like to be a mother, watching your child die, unable to help. In most parts of this country we are not accustomed to that feeling of helplessness. Our "can-do" attitude is deeply ingrained and so when a situation like the sniper emerges, where no logic or good attitude can stop the reign of terror, we don't know what to do. We tread the waters of our own disillusionment. "Disillusionment" because we have to let go of our illusions of control and it shatters us to do so.
Soon, in addition to our local violence, we will be sending troops into war in Iraq. Each soldier is the child of somebody. Each person who will die as a direct result of our bombing is also somebody's child. And each person who will die as an indirect result of the bombs is somebody's child. Already, children in Iraq die in alarming numbers, in no small part because of the damage we have already done to the infrastructure there and because of our sanctions against the country. Each one is some mother's child.
And so I turn in these days to the God described in Amos as a mother bear and in the Psalms and gospels as a mother hen and mother eagle.
The fierce grief of a mother bear who has lost her cubs has no compare. Amos describes God's disappointment in humanity's pride and ingratitude, with God saying, "like a bear robbed of her cubs, I will pounce upon them ..." How God must grieve at the senseless loss of lives. How like a mother bear, tearing through the wilderness, wild with unfathomable sorrow. Growling with an intensity of anguish. This is how I see God responding to loss of innocent life wherever it happens.
A mother bear will strike out at those who have injured her cubs. But against whom would God strike? Even the sniper is one of her cubs. Perhaps this mother bear God grieves as fiercely for the loss of this child -- lost to himself, lost to God, so lost in a mad reign of terror that what was once his humanity is so badly blurred as to be unrecognizable.
In Psalm 91, we read this:
"You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust. ... God will cover you with feathers and under God's wings you will find refuge."
God promises in that passage to shelter us under wings like a mother
bird gathering her young together and Jesus repeats this image as he
mourns over the violence in Jerusalem.
How does God view what is happening in the world? Where is God's help for us? I think God hovers like a mother bird, longing to keep us safe and grieves like a mother bear, fiercely, when she cannot.
But why can't God keep us safe, we may wonder? Why does evil exist? Why do good things happen to bad people?
There is no simple answer to these questions. They are questions repeated from one generation to the next and no single answer is fully satisfactory. But one simple piece of the puzzle is that God has given us freedom to make our own lives and chart our own paths. Because God wants us to enjoy God-like creativity and compassion, we had to be given the freedom to grow. And freedom to grow includes freedom to fall.
In Deuteronomy 32, God is compared to a mother eagle who spreads her wings and bears her young up on them, taking them out of the nest to learn to fly. The image of the mother eagle is of great trust and empowerment. Here is a God willing to drop us from high places, knowing that we have it within us, within our spirits, within our very DNA, to find our wings and find the right currents and learn to soar. Here is a God who wants to let us go and see us fly.
How terrible it must seem to God when the flight we take is not on the currents of the spirit. When we choose currents of hate rather than love. Currents of fear rather than faith. How fiercely she must grieve.
Still, the mother eagle bears us up. The mother eagle keeps showing us the currents we need. Whatever happens in the world, we are carried up again and again and challenged to fly.
In the days ahead, when we feel overcome by anxiety and vulnerability, may we all be sheltered under the wings of God.
And when we feel burdened by the loss around us, may we learn to grieve with the fierceness of a mother bear.
And when the winds of the world seem to threaten like a storm, may we trust the eagle spirit within us and learn to soar on the currents of love.
Webmaster : Brian C. Monsell